Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

What Deci found, and then confirmed in two additional studies he conducted shortly thereafter, was almost the opposite. “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” he wrote.5 Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.

Deci said, have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn.” But this third drive was more fragile than the other two; it needed the right environment to survive. “One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards,” he wrote in a follow-up paper.6 Thus began what for Deci became a lifelong quest to rethink why we do what we do—a pursuit that sometimes put him at odds with fellow psychologists, got him fired from a business school, and challenged the operating assumptions of organizations everywhere.

Too many organizations—not just companies, but governments and nonprofits as well—still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don’t work and often do harm. Worse, these practices have infiltrated our schools, where we ply our future workforce with iPods, cash, and pizza coupons to “incentivize” them to learn. Something has gone wrong.

“Type I” behavior, a way of thinking and an approach to business grounded in the real science of human motivation and powered by our third drive—our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

And so in a feat of remarkable cultural engineering, we slowly replaced the existing version with one more compatible with how we’d now begun working and living.

The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.

People have other, higher drives, he said. And these drives could benefit businesses if managers and business leaders respected them.

route to quality and continual improvement was intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivators like bonuses, incentive plans, and forced rankings.

modest improvement rather than a thorough upgrade—Motivation

Our current operating system has become far less compatible with, and at times downright antagonistic to: how we organize what we do; how we think about what we do; and how we do what we do.

“that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.”

discovered, reported that they frequently reached the state of optimal challenge called “flow.”

open source is only one way people are restructuring what they do along new organizational lines and atop different motivational ground.

an L3C “operate[s] like a for-profit business generating at least modest profits, but its primary aim [is] to offer significant social benefits.” Three

U.S. entrepreneurs have invented the “B Corporation,” a designation that requires companies to amend their bylaws so that the incentives favor long-term value and social impact instead of short-term economic gain.

purpose maximizers—which are unsuited to this older operating

They just believed that we’d placed too much emphasis on the economic and not enough on the human. That hyperrational calculator-brained person wasn’t real. He was a convenient fiction.

Like the behavioral economists, he has argued that we need to move beyond the idea of Homo Oeconomicus (Economic Man, that fictional wealth-maximizing android). But his extension goes in a slightly different direction—to what he calls Homo Oeconomicus Maturus (or Mature Economic Man). This figure, he says, “is more ‘mature’ in the sense that he is endowed with a more refined motivational structure.”

“Intrinsic motivation is of great importance for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives.”8

Behavioral scientists often divide what we do on the job or learn in school into two categories: “algorithmic” and “heuristic.”

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work.9 A key reason: Routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine work generally cannot.10

In other words, the central tenets of Motivation 2.0

may actually impair performance of the heuristic, right-brain work on which modern economies depend.

adding certain kinds of extrinsic rewards on top of inherently interesting tasks can often dampen motivation and diminish performance.

As organizations flatten, companies need people who are self-motivated.

Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; nonroutine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.

When he conducts job interviews, he tells prospective employees: “If you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you.”

intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers.

An object in motion will stay in motion, and an object at rest will stay at rest, unless acted on by an outside force.

Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.

Motivation 2.0 is similar in this regard, too. When rewards and punishments encounter our third drive, something akin to behavioral quantum mechanics seems to take over and strange things begin to happen.

“baseline rewards.”

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. But once we’ve cleared the table, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims.

rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge.

Sawyer Effect.a A sampling of intriguing experiments around the world reveals the four realms where this effect kicks in.

When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? “If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy.

tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation,”

“When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage.3

“People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”

If you’re going to pay people to perform, you have to pay them a meaningful amount.

“In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.”

In 2009, scholars at the London School of Economics—alma mater of eleven Nobel laureates in economics—analyzed fifty-one studies of corporate pay-for-performance plans. These economists’ conclusion: “We find that financial incentives . . . can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”6 On both sides of the Atlantic, the gap between what science is learning

and what business is doing is wide.

What happens when you give people a conceptual challenge like this and offer them rewards for speedy solutions?

Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus.

That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster.

effects of contingent rewards on the creative process.

Not always, but a lot of the time, when you are

doing a piece for someone else it becomes more “work” than joy. When I work for myself there is the pure joy of creating and I can work through the night and not even know it. On a commissioned piece you have to check yourself—be careful to do what the client wants.8

Painters and sculptors who were intrinsically motivated, those for whom the joy of discovery and the challenge of creation were their own rewards, were able to weather the tough times—and the lack of remuneration and recognition—that inevitably accompany artistic careers.